They were all answering at once. ‘Anytime he can take us off to the station.’
‘You gotta watch out for him all the time.’
‘My boyfriend said next time he do it to me, he’ll kill him.’
‘Yeah. One time I even told him I had the rags on, and he jus’ said, “Well, jus’ open your mouth”.’
‘He call us names all the time, too. Like “Poxy bitch” and “Black cunt”.’
I stood around with the girls for a while and tried to get enough information to make a case. Although they had each been subjected to various gross indecencies and in many ways corroborated each other’s stories, the policeman had always taken the precaution of never taking two girls at the same time, never providing them with a witness. So it would always be one girl’s word against his own.
I heard similar stories in several country towns, and was always sickened. Yet I was never able to get evidence, apart from hearing over and over about such incidents from different girls at different times, which I doubted would stand up in a court. I was told that young Aboriginal men who threatened the police offenders who had molested their girlfriends always found themselves in jail. Some even became what was later called a ‘death in custody’.
I wondered a lot about these towns, their isolation from centres that would investigate these incidents, their social structure which ensured that what was common knowledge in the Black community never leaked over into the white community—did not penetrate the consciousness of, for instance, the wives of the offending officers.
I realise the paradox in saying how much I enjoyed this work, because I was so often confronted with misery and situations that made me feel impotent. Yet the small things that I could do to alleviate suffering were often so pleasing, so satisfying, that my life still felt, in a strange way, perhaps a busy way, fulfilled.
The thing I liked best about all the travelling was being alone in the car and being in the bush. Often I would see a good place to stop, sometimes beside a creek or under a shady tree, and just pull up and kill the engine. The sounds of the bush took over, because there seems to be no real silence, that is, the total absence of sound, in the bush. Birds caw in the distance, flies buzz constantly, and the smell of water in perspiration, I swear, attracts every little flying and stumbling creature within coo-ee. For a brief moment after the motor dies, there is the illusion of quiet, but it’s a quiet only in contrast to the mechanical sound.
In those periods of tranquillity I had time to think, to focus on the things I had seen and try to place them in the context of what I knew, in the search for solutions. I still read avidly and was constantly learning—about the law, the environment, economic development—and I always came to the same conclusion. There had to be radical change and economic independence before the situation of Aboriginal people could be rectified. We had been on the right track in 1972, in Canberra, when the Aboriginal Embassy had put forward its demands. Land rights and land rights compensation were the only just way out of the quagmire. This would enable the Black community to develop sufficient economic, social and political power to force change on this society. But eighteen million white people were yet to be convinced.
In Sydney I was busy supporting a range of Black community and women’s endeavours, in the hope that the prototypes we were developing would ultimately spill over into the country areas and bring a measure of relief. Rape crisis centres, rape counselling, refuges for victims of domestic violence—all were on my agenda. I was later to become disillusioned by the fact that racism by white crisis and refuge workers as well as from their white clients continued, in many cases, to make these services unavailable to Black women.
I kept myself so busy that I rarely had time to consider my own situation or pause to address the psychological problems which I knew to be driving me furiously on. In the country, unless I had been able to get a message through to one of the many Aboriginal safe-houses at which I was assured of a warm welcome, I routinely drove through the night towards my destination until tiredness overtook me. I then slept curled up on the bench seat of the Health Department car, rather than confront the racism that would almost inevitably arise if I tried to book into many of the wayside motels. At home in Sydney, I worked until, exhausted, I would often fall asleep with my head down on my desk or on top of my typewriter, only to wake in a few hours, freezing cold, and crawl, fully dressed, under the covers of my bed.
Despite these efforts to keep myself bombed out with work, on occasions I was still troubled with the nightmares.
I am hovering in a corner above and, looking down in the darkness, I see a small crowd of men. They are passing around brown beer bottles, taking swigs, laughing, jostling each other and talking amongst themselves. On the ground lies a small naked form, a girl, very thin, her ribs clearly etched beneath her brown skin. She is motionless. Her eyes, full of fear, are wide open, yet there is no recognition, no indication that she is seeing anything at all.
A square of moonlight, streaming through a hole where a window and glass panes may once have been, provides the only light, brightening portions of the dirt floor and walls where it falls. A man unzips his trousers and stumbles to his knees upon the girl, fumbling for purchase. A tremor of laughter rises from the assembled men inside the room. Outside the hut, others stand in earnest mumbled conversation, waiting their turn. Several cars are parked haphazard, doors left open and interior lights softly glowing, illuminating the faces of more men, smoking cigarettes, a hand drumming on a dashboard in impatience.
As I lift my eyes I suddenly see the girl rise up from the earth, her movements effortless and fluid. With an amazing bound, she is out the windowframe. Her feet barely touching the ground, moonlight clearly outlining her thin limbs, her frail shoulder bones, her small childish buttocks and giving her an almost silver glow as she runs. I watch her disappear, slip silently amongst a sparse clump of trees. There is freedom in her graceful form. I stare after her until she has completely vanished.
But when I look back to the dirt, in reality the girl is still there, still lying motionless, and I realise that the escape happened only in my mind.
The man who had laid upon her has been hoisted to his feet by his friends. He stands unsteadily, groping at his clothes. The others turn to watch the second-comer, who smiles lasciviously, drops to his haunches and pulls the young girl’s legs so that they are straight. ‘Looks good enough to eat,’ he announces to his audience, receiving ‘Ugh’ and ‘Uh-uh’ responses from his friends. He leans forward and I see his teeth flashing for a moment before they sink into the girl’s lower abdomen. Even his friends are startled. He looks up at them, his teeth stained with blood, and smirks his approval. The small gasp and sob that rose up from the girl’s mouth does not appear to have been heard by any of the men, but it echoes around the shack, piercing my ears and numbing my senses. I feel that I am about to burst.
My eyes open and, in half my mind, I realise I am lying safely at home in my own bed. But somehow, in another part of my mind, I am now also inside the body of the young girl. Rough skin, gravelly with stubble, rasps brutally against my shoulder, hurried breathing and grunts insult my ear, and I am overcome with the reek of beer fumes. A hard hand grasps my left hip as a flabby body over heavy bones assaults me, pounds upon me, smack, smack, smack. I struggle to become fully awake, to leave this nightmare, to find sanity in the security of my own familiar bedroom in my locked house. My pillow is soaked with my tears. How often, I frequently rage to myself, must I wake from death?
Tea. I get up and make myself a cup of tea. I’ll sit here, willing myself to stop shaking, try to calm myself, sitting at the kitchen table until dawn, if necessary, in order to give myself time to recover.
I prowl the house, check on my sleeping children, sit quietly for a while on the corners of their beds, watch their innocent faces and imagine them growing as they rest, their breathing even, their faces beautiful in repose as they are in activity. These children are my anchors, f
orcing me to stay with them, though I so often yearn to escape. I find so few brief moments of peace in the struggle of my days, the agony of my nights, that I long for oblivion. Death looks so sweet.
In my occasional rare daytime examinations of my nightmares, I always realise there is something wrong with me and with the dream. Until I work out exactly what that is, I will always be plagued. But I can’t speak to anyone about this. I feel there is no one whom I trust enough to share my secret and shameful inner life. At the same time, I worry about my sanity. The psychology books I am reading keep informing me of a host of possible consequences of carrying around a concealed trauma.
It is easier for me, then, to concentrate on what I have done with my trauma, rather than on the trauma itself. I create fantasies. I imagine these awful events of the past as the small stone in an oyster, my mind being that oyster. I can’t dislodge the stone, so instead I put down layer after layer of nacre, which are my layers of pretence, everything’s all right Jack, until, over time, there will be no jagged stone, just a lovely smooth and quietly luminescent pearl.
Inside myself, I can do with the happy ending, so the fantasy always has to stop right there. I consciously reject the thought that threatens to follow: pearls before swine.
2
Since the early days of my arrival from the north and my leap into so-called radical Black politics, I have learned many lessons. Some later stood me in good stead, others make me laugh now when I recall them. If I’d known any seriously rich people in Townsville, I had been unaware of it. As a public educator about Aboriginal problems and a key community organisation fund-raiser, though, I had found myself rubbing shoulders with the rich, famous, and sometimes notorious.
Initially I had been intimidated by rich people, by their wealth actually, not by their minds or personalities. At the same time, the women’s movement was pushing equality and I had taken it to heart. Rich people would invite me to lunch to talk about possible sponsorship of projects and community services for which I was trying to drum up support. When it came time to pay the bill, as an advocate for women’s equality, I always fought them to pay my share.
After one such performance, the memory of which causes me enormous embarrassment, a woman who had also been at the lunch took me aside and talked to me about my reasons and the outcome.
‘Do you think rich people go away thinking, “My, isn’t she equal”?’ she asked.
I was amazed because I had never stopped to wonder what they thought at all. I realised I had only been concerned about proving to myself that I was equal.
‘You didn’t choose this fancy place to eat, one of these guys did. And when you go home and count the pennies you have left to feed your children, you’re going to miss the dollars you insisted you contribute as your share. Do you think paying the bill is going to make any difference to the lifestyle of any of those blokes? No. But it’ll probably make a big difference to yours. So just let it rest, okay.’
I later learned that this adviser had married a man with money, but had not forgotten her childhood and her own mother’s struggle to put food on the table. Though grateful for her advice, I continued to fret about accepting generosity when it was offered, and struggled with the notion that my equality did not depend on whether I could beat the host to the bill to pay my share. The reality of my situation caused me to closely examine much of the rhetoric of the women’s movement and its manifestations in my daily life.
I often felt I was in no man’s land, caught up in rapidly changing times vis-a-vis the advancement in the status of women. This alone would have been heady and confusing, but I also had to deal with being a spearhead in the Black community’s charge on white society in an effort to gain equal rights, and the changes in perception which this forced upon all of us. There was also angst in the Black community which I felt was caused, curiously enough, by both the slowness and the rapidity with which social changes were taking place. Over time I began to appreciate that it was the unevenness with which these social changes were distributed throughout the community that was weakening our community structure, leaving it frail and vulnerable.
Fortunately MumShirl was my chief mentor. While she was never a social analyst, she had devised her own set of behavioural rules which, for a long time, had stood her in good stead. MumShirl ignored anything she didn’t understand and concentrated her energies on those things she did. She had an innate understanding of the full range of human emotions and could spot their manifestations almost immediately. I recall a meeting she and i attended, a lunch with a man who had contacted me to offer help with some community project we were working on. I found the man’s conversation quite confusing, he had arrived with a briefcase of notes, newspaper clippings and quotes from, well, he called them philosophers but neither MumShirl nor I had ever heard of any of them. And he never did reach whatever point he’d come to make.
I walked away from that meeting a bit discouraged, I felt as though nothing had been resolved. Meetings with potential sponsors usually had a pattern about them. We rarely contacted potential sponsors ourselves for fear of rebuff, so, with just a few exceptions, they usually made the first move. They would tell us of their area of interest, whether it was to aid medical or legal services, or if they had been touched by the plight of needy children, for instance. We would then give them a range of options until we had a match between their interests and current needs in the Black community, and we would proceed from there. At this particular meeting, we hadn’t even reached the first step. By the time we took our leave, the man had still not divulged his area of interest, though he bought us a delicious lunch. He was waiting for a receipt when MumShirl and I made our way back out onto the street.
‘Well, what did you make of that, Mum?’ I asked, still trying to get something out of the quotes he had read to us from his scraps of paper.
‘Greedy,’ Mum replied, which elicited from me my standard reply when I couldn’t see how she had put fragments together to come up with a total. ‘Huh?’
‘What does he do? D’ya get his card?’
‘No, I’ll run back and ask him for one now.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Mum said, looking about for a taxi. ‘I’ll bet you anything he sells insurance. He’s read in the papers ’s going to spend money on the Black community, and he wants some of it. Probably a big slab of it. You’ll see.’
With a rush, everything the man had said over lunch fell into place. He had never mentioned ‘insurance’ as such, but he had spoken about vagaries such as ‘gains in the area’, ‘protection against the future’, and ‘the balance on the slates’. I had sort of forgiven him as he talked, considering his terminology ‘businessmen’s jargon’ and thinking he was slowly working his way around to telling us what he had in mind, how he thought he could help.
Mum said she’d pinned down his personality by just watching him, she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. A week or so later he rang again and asked if Mum and I had thought about his ‘offer’, would we like to have lunch again?
I was tempted to accept, to rat out this guy, make him put his cards on the table. Then I would give him a big rouse for wasting our time and for trying to get something out of the poorest people in the land. Mum said if I went, it wouldn’t be the man wasting my time, I’d be wasting my own time.
Was it because I was so deeply involved with understanding the connections between the causes of poverty and despair in the Black community, that it hadn’t occurred to me that a white, apparently wealthy and successful business person would see us as grist for his money-making mill?
Over time, however, as governments increased their allocations and trumpeted what sounded like fantastic sums of money to be spent in Aboriginal Affairs, all manner of greedy opportunists tried to climb aboard. And we began to watch out for them. We knew that they were unaware, as we were, that the bulk of government funding went to white agencies and administrators, contractors and career Black-helpers, while very little trickl
ed down to the Black people in need.
On the other hand, I was also fortunate to meet people with what MumShirl and I called ‘heart’. Some of them were rich, though many were only pensioners and battlers. They were people who were saddened by the poverty of others, by the death of a child, or by the plight of the homeless and despairing, no matter what colour, and they made an effort, however small, to do something about it. I still like to think they outnumber what MumShirl called the ‘greedy’, but I learned that they don’t cancel out the greedy. The greedy walk amongst the poor every day and connive to take the shirt from their backs, even knowing that he or she only had one shirt. The problem, as I see it, is that often the poor are unaware of this, and because kindness is almost a currency between themselves and other poor people, they even offer their shirt, while the greedy merely add it to their extensive wardrobe.
But these are by no means the only white people I met on the streets, hanging around in the Black community. There is a rawness, an earthiness, about poverty, material or spiritual, that, in some instances, seems to transcend differences.
Driving MumShirl, who had no car or licence, whose size and health prevented her from travelling on public transport, I was exposed to an array of people in such diverse circumstances.
In her efforts to keep the Black community together, keep families together, and locate and shepherd people back into the flock, I trailed after her, often in the midnight hours, through churches, graveyards, prisons and brothels. We slept in convents and were feted by nuns. We took shelter in the houses of strangers and were sometimes met with hospitality but occasionally suspicion. I have lost count of the number of times I caught a few hours sleep in the car by the side of the road with my head resting on Mum’s handbag or leg while she kept guard against marauders. We chatted on our long drives through the countryside about almost every subject under the sun. Even Mum’s frequent snores were punctuated with, ‘Uhuh, yes, keep talking. I’m not really asleep.’
Snake Circle Page 2
